


Pour violoncelle et piano

by apinchofcyanide



Category: Original Work
Genre: Canon Gay Relationship, M/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-12
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-11-18 12:13:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/560948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apinchofcyanide/pseuds/apinchofcyanide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Balthazar Reeves has come to learn over the last few centuries that being a vampire is not nearly as lucrative as one might expect--so he rents out part of his home to humans in exchange for help paying his bills (and the occasional free meal). Because he knows all too well that humans up and die when you least expect them to, he has vowed never to become too close to one of his tenants; that is, until Gavin moves in.</p>
<p>Or, a series of drabbles about grumpy vampires and musicians who tolerate them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Church steeples

**Author's Note:**

> The story has a new title. Don't panic.

 

I.  _Church steeples;_

Balthazar can feel them before he sees them; it’s a prickle at the back of his neck, just a little shiver of dread. His languorous pace—why walk quickly when you literally have all the time in the world—creeps to a stop. He feels his gaze being drawn upward, and sees them, rising high above the surrounding trees—the steeples of Saint Benedictine. That little shiver of dread courses down his spine and settles into the base of his stomach, a cold fist with an iron grip on his insides. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, old boy,’ he thinks to himself. He stares defiantly at the steeples. He is not some newborn to be controlled by the fear of an empty building, and yet—

He shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat, and continues his walk in the opposite direction.

 

 

II.  _A quiet and dusty museum;_

 

“I hate museums,” Balthazar complains, loud enough that several of the other patrons look at him in indignation. He looks around the room with a sneer. There’s a painting on the far wall that he’s almost certain he was there for the creation of. “They’re just another way for humans to cling to the past.”

“I _love_ museums,” sighs Gavin, unbothered. “There’s something magical about being able to peer into the past, to catch a glimpse through time and see how those before us lived.” At Balthazar’s skeptical look, he gives a small smile. “Or maybe I just like being surrounded by dusty old relics.”

“Is that why you keep me around?” Balthazar asks. Gavin’s smile curves a little deeper and he pats Balthazar’s arm. It isn’t a _no_.

 

 

III.  _Contrast, vulnerability, and butterfly kisses;_

 

Gavin is everything that Balthazar is not. Gavin is warmth and kindness and sunlight. Balthazar is cold and cruelty and darkness. Gavin is all of the good things that Balthazar no longer sees in himself, and—though he won’t admit it to himself—he’s terrified, he’s _so_ terrified of losing that warmth and that goodness, because that is Balthazar’s curse. He poisons everything he touches.

He presses a barely-there kiss to Gavin’s shoulder and wonders when everything is going to come crashing down around him.

 

 

IV.  _Dawn;_

 

The bedroom curtains are shut tight, but Balthazar can feel the dawn creeping up on him. It brings with it a bone-deep weariness; Balthazar feels exhausted. Then again, he is _always_ exhausted. That is part of it. He wants to crawl into the ground and never come out—at least, not for the next twelve hours—but he can’t yet, not until—

“Were you watching me s-sleep?” Gavin yawns, sitting up in bed. His dark hair is sticking up on one side. There’s a red pillow-crease on his face.

“Yes,” Balthazar says. There really is no point in hiding it. “I always do.”

“That’s quite creepy,” Gavin says, but he’s smiling, lop-sided and lazy.

“I have to go.” Balthazar stands abruptly. He can barely keep his eyes open, now.

Gavin nods. “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Tonight,” Balthazar promises, and then he is gone.

 

 

V.  _Celebration of the ordinary;_

 

“Happy birthday, Bal.” Gavin sets a cupcake with a single candle on the table in front of Balthazar, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

“What,” says Balthazar eloquently. Gavin’s forehead creases the way it does when he’s confused.

“It’s your birthday,” he says. “You’re three hundred ninety-eight today.”

“It’s not my birthday,” Balthazar argues. The creases in Gavin’s forehead furrow deeper, accompanied this time by a frown.

“But this is the date on the tomb.”

Balthazar scrubs a hand over his face. “No, I mean—it’s not my birthday. I don’t celebrate my birthday. It’s just an ordinary day, Gavin.”

“Oh.” Gavin looks forlornly at the cupcake for a moment before taking a seat across from Balthazar. With a quick breath he blows out the candle and cuts the cupcake in half with the butter knife. “Well, consider this a celebration of the ordinary, then,” he says, and the corner of Balthazar’s mouth ticks up in a smile. Gavin considers it a victory.

 

 

VI.  _Earth;_

 

The earth underneath the house is hard, packed solid and unforgiving. There’s a perfectly good crypt down the way, Balthazar knows, but he prefers the crawlspace anymore. He likes hearing the sound of feet overhead.

 

 

VII.  _Falling snow;_

 

Gavin shivers; the force of it wracks his spindly frame. “Should’ve brought a thicker coat,” he mutters, wrapping his arms around himself. There’s snow dusting his dark hair.

Balthazar sighs despairingly before shrugging off his own and putting it around Gavin’s shoulders. He’s wearing only a white shirt and waistcoat underneath.

“But won’t you freeze?” Gavin protests.

“I don’t feel the cold,” Balthazar says gruffly. The snow is falling harder now; he can see it collecting on Gavin’s eyelashes. “Maybe I just don’t remember how.”

“Must be nice,” says Gavin. Balthazar really couldn’t say one way or the other; he doesn’t remember what warm feels like, either.

The snow keeps falling.

 

 

VIII.  _Leave me to it;_

 

This is what Balthazar hates, when Gavin sees him like this: white shirt stained red, eyes blown wide and hungry. He’s on his knees in the back hallway—the body (he can’t think of them as _people_ anymore; it makes him too guilty) had tried to run before he could get it into the basement—trying to scrub up the mess he’s made when Gavin comes down the stairs.

“Oh,” is all Gavin says, but Balthazar knows that surely he must be repulsed by what he sees, at least a little bit.

Yet, Gavin gets to his knees beside Balthazar and grabs the extra sponge out of the bucket.

“Just leave me to it, Gavin,” Balthazar orders. The other man just scoffs, rolling his eyes up at Balthazar.

“Not a chance, Bal,” he says. Balthazar has the feeling he’s speaking of more than just the clean-up.

 

 

IX.  _Sin;_

 

It’s almost a sin, Balthazar thinks, to ruin such a perfect thing, right before he sinks his fangs into the curve of Gavin’s thigh.

 

 

X.  _Hands;_

 

There are many things to like about Gavin’s body. Balthazar likes his slightly crooked nose. He likes the way Gavin seems to be all elbows and knobby knees, and the way he smiles, slow and lazy and lop-sided. But the best part of Gavin’s body, the part Balthazar likes the most, are his hands. You can tell a lot about a person by their hands. Gavin’s are sure and confident, prone to flapping about wildly when he gets excited. His fingers are long and slender and covered in callouses; a musician’s hands. He likes Gavin’s hands when they’re shuffling old documents or turning the pages lovingly in one of Balthazar’s antique books. He likes Gavin’s hands as he strikes the bow on his cello, or plucks the strings pizzicato. But most of all, Balthazar likes Gavin’s hands when they’re needy, hot and insistent, fumbling with buttons on trousers and tracing patterns on skin. 

 


	2. Forever is a very long time (to live)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boy's name is Gavin.

Balthazar Reeves became a vampire because all the cool kids were doing it, and several centuries in he’s decided that the bite is a gift he would very much like to give back.

 

 

The one thing no one ever mentions about living forever is that forever is a very long time to live, especially when everyone you’ve ever known or loved is going to grow old and die without you. But no one is ever thinking of their loved ones when they’re on their knees with some stranger’s fangs buried in their throat. Becoming a vampire is about as selfish as one person can get.

 

 

Of course one always has the option to be good. Hospitals and blood banks are excellent for the sort of self-loathing cretin who bemoans taking human life out of some displaced sense of loyalty to a species he is no longer a part of. Balthazar never had many qualms about killing people—his self-loathing comes from a different place entirely.

 

Blood tastes better fresh out of the vein anyway.

 

 

Balthazar’s housemate dies on a Thursday afternoon, which doesn’t come as a surprise at all. Vampires are second only to cats when it comes to being able to smell death on a person. His housemate throws a blood clot in her brain on a Thursday afternoon, and there goes one more person Balthazar knew, dying and leaving him behind.

 

He puts out an ad in the paper.

 

 

It takes Balthazar a month to find a new housemate. There’s a certain sort of person that always responds first to personal ads posted by vampires: Balthazar thinks of them as junkies, shaking and stinking of desperation. They don’t want to help him pay half his rent so much as they want him to lock them in his eternal dark embrace or something equally as idiotic. After weeks of suffering these people showing up on his doorstep Balthazar is almost convinced that there are no decent humans left in the world.

 

And then He shows up.

 

 

‘He’ in this case being a scrawny excuse of a person, with clothes that don’t fit quite right and bags under his eyes. He looks like he survives on nothing but caffeine and determination, and even though Balthazar knows there’s probably nothing but slush in his veins, he finds himself inviting the boy in anyway.

 

 

Well, he says ‘boy.’ Physically Balthazar’s guest is probably a handful of years older than him, but when your mind has been around four hundred years, things like physical age hardly seem worth fretting over.

 

 

The boy’s name is Gavin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short companion piece to _Church Steeples_ , takes place prior to that.


	3. Nothing gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing good can last forever.

They never talk about it.  


  
It starts as little things—Gavin having bouts of insomnia, losing his appetite. He always dismisses Balthazar's concerns.  
  
(“It's normal, Bal; after all these years when have you ever known me to sleep through the night?”)  
  


Then come the mood swings. The migraines. The vomiting. Balthazar pleads with Gavin to see a doctor.  
  
(“You know I find doctors too invasive, Bal. Don't worry, I'm fine.”)  
  


Vampires are second only to cats at sensing death. It's a well-known fact. When Balthazar buries his nose in Gavin's messy hair and inhales, underneath the scent of cheap shampoo and sweat, he can smell something rotten.  
  
It smells like death.  
  


In the end, Gavin collapses in the middle of one of his lessons, panicking thirty or so aspiring cellists in the process.  
  
It's the middle of the afternoon, but Balthazar dons sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat and braves downtown traffic anyway.  
  


The doctor gives them a diagnosis, fancy words for things Balthazar already knew but was too scared to admit.  
  
Tumor. Inoperable. Terminal.  
  
“I know this is a difficult thing to hear about your father,” says the doctor.  
  
He's not my father, Balthazar wants to say, but finds he cannot speak when Gavin grabs his hand.  
  


They settle on in-home care, because Gavin loves the old house too much to part from it, and the hospital won't let him play his cello music after midnight.  
  


It's surprising how easily Balthazar slides into the role of nurse; compassion was never his strong suit, but this is Gavin. If Balthazar really looks, he can still see the boy who showed up on his doorstep twenty years ago, all flustered and unkempt, fingers tapping along to music only he could hear.  
  
He still taps his fingers like that, fingernails clicking on the rails of his hospital bed.  
  


Gavin never asks, and he never will, so the decision ultimately comes down to Balthazar, who sits on the edge of Gavin's bed one day with blood welling up from the cut on his wrist. “Only if you want it,” he says when Gavin just stares at him. “But I have to warn you—your body may reject it.”  
  
Gavin pauses, considerate. Then he leans forward and seals his lips to the wound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay for non-linear storytelling.


	4. The thirty-year lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "the thirty-year lie" on Tumblr.

 

 

“Don’t you think he’s a bit _young_ for you?”

The first time it happens, they’re at the symphony after-party and the orchestra director is leaned in close to Gavin, mouth barely forming the words should someone overhear; after all, he doesn’t want to be seen admonishing his new star cellist, not when Gavin’s name is falling from the lips of everyone who is someone tonight.

This is the first time they’ve been out together in public since moving to a new city. Physically the age difference is around ten years, but thanks to Balthazar’s porcelain-like beauty, it appears more.

Balthazar hears; of course he does. Even though he’s at the far side of the room being cooed at and petted by women in sparkling evening dresses, he hears with perfect clarity the conversation between Gavin and the orchestra director.

Correction: what he _hears_ is Gavin stutter some incomprehensible nonsense before he excuses himself and practically runs to the side exit door, stumbling out into the parking lot like the devil himself is after him. Extricating himself from the gaggle of giggling harpies that have been occupying his time, he follows suit.

Gavin is propped against the exterior of the theater, doubled over and breathing heavily like he’s about to be sick. Balthazar just stands beside him and rubs circles on his back until Gavin finds the resolve to speak.

“He had some _concerns_ ,” he spits. “God, Bal—they all think I’m some kind of pedophile!”

“Now, be reasonable,” Balthazar says. “I don’t look _that_ young.”

“In the right light you could be a minor.” Gavin stands, brushing aside Balthazar’s hand. “And I could be a sex offender.”

He threads long, calloused fingers through his untamable hair, being very near what Balthazar recognizes as the verge of a nervous breakdown. “You could always leave,” he suggests. Four hundred years will do a lot for someone’s sense of tact—namely, decimate it. “Find someone your own age. It isn’t too late.”

Gavin turns on him, offended. “What, and forget about all of this?” He waves a hand at the space between them, an indicator of ten years’ worth of traveling and living and _togetherness_.

“It only gets worse from here.” Balthazar pushes off the wall, coming to stand in front of Gavin, and takes Gavin’s hands in his own. They have a tremble to them which has nothing to do with the night’s temperature. “A few more years and we won’t just be an odd couple—people will start mistaking you for my father. Unless—” He cuts himself off, but Gavin looks up with bright eyes.

“Unless?” he prompts.

Balthazar sighs. This is a subject he tries never to broach. “Unless I make you like me. You could be thirty for the next thousand years; we would never have to deal with stares and whispers and idiotic questions.”

Gavin hesitates, his fingers clutching Balthazar’s. “No,” he finally says. “No, I don’t think I want to be like you.”

His heart rate has picked up, thundering underneath the lie, but Balthazar just nods. “Very well,” he says. When they go back inside, he makes sure to plant a just-this-side-of-obscene kiss on Gavin, right in front of the orchestra director. Let them whisper for as long as they can. Gavin only has five more decades of life left in him, statistically speaking. Balthazar intends to make the most of it. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this, please consider visiting my [website](http://paigewrites.com), or taking a look at my [Patreon](http://www.patreon.com/paigewrites).


End file.
